Iīve heard this "urban myth" going around amongst some of my fishing buddies, saying that big and old trout eat less since theyīve "grown all they can and have plenty of fat reserves" so they would probably be targetting small flies (so the myth says).

On the other hand, one might think big fish would need big food in order to maintain body weight (I donīt think that big boxer called "butterbean" could survive only with lettuce sandwiches...)

Is there any relation to the fishes size and the fly size one should be using?
supposing there isnīt any visible hatches fish might be targetting, big flies for big fish, the other way around or it doesnīt make a difference??

thanks.

zimflo.

07-26-2007, 11:59 PM

Ide say stick with matching the hatch.. and I have ALWAYS had awesome luck with small patterns, griffiths gnats, trico patterns, and cdc flies all kick..

But, take into consideration that small fish wont eat big flies..(they cant) and small flies will catch almost anything.. so if you want to weed out the little fellas use the big flies.. And, I dont know if this is true.. but I think big flies are harder to present because fish can see them better.. small flies are small lol, and thus harder to see and define as food, so fish reconize them as a local insect, but cant tell its a fake.. Make sense?

jero

07-27-2007, 08:00 AM

makes sense
changing the subject, I see your home water is the alsea and siletz river. Mine is Argentina, way south. When I was a teenager I lived in corvallis for a couple of years (my old man was studying at OSU) and thatīs where I more or less learned to speak english.

Iīv actually caught trout in your alsea river!! Once I got a nice cutthroat (fishing with salmon eggs, not fly fishing). Its a beautyful river. Anyways, funny how life is, if your ever down in Corvallis in the "scarlet ibis" fly shop, tell the guys down there they introduced a 15 year old teenager to fly fishing (upper wilamette and the santiam river is where I used to go), who 15 years later still fly fishes about 11.000 Km. south!

I remeber these guys from the shop, the lived in Nepal I think (or maybe Mongolia), they went there with the Peace Corps, taught some people there to tie flies and actually later imported the flies from asia and gave those people a chance to make a few bucks and escape poverty. Cool thing to do.
well, thanks for the tip.

popper

07-27-2007, 08:44 AM

Bear in mind that I know less about trout-fishing than most people on this board, but I did study ichthyology in general at the graduate level. So here's my .02...

People do studies all the time of what fish prefer to eat, and in general (with room for lots of exceptions), the larger the fish, the larger their preferred prey. Once I netted a bunch of juvenile bluefish about 3-4" long for a study, and in the lab they regurtitated lots of tiny copepods that they had been feeding on. Obviously when they get just a little bit longer they turn to a fish diet. You can even see this, though, with fish like eels, which in freshwater start out eating insect larvae and the like but incorporate more and more small fish into their diet as they get larger.

With that said, I think that it is good advice that you have to match the hatch, because even very large fish will eat small food if it is super-abundant. Think of a bear eating blueberries. The bear might prefer to eat salmon, but if there aren't any salmon around, it will go with the abundant food. Fish are the same way.

zimflo.

07-27-2007, 09:31 AM

makes sense
changing the subject, I see your home water is the alsea and siletz river. Mine is Argentina, way south. When I was a teenager I lived in corvallis for a couple of years (my old man was studying at OSU) and thatīs where I more or less learned to speak english.

Iīv actually caught trout in your alsea river!! Once I got a nice cutthroat (fishing with salmon eggs, not fly fishing). Its a beautyful river. Anyways, funny how life is, if your ever down in Corvallis in the "scarlet ibis" fly shop, tell the guys down there they introduced a 15 year old teenager to fly fishing (upper wilamette and the santiam river is where I used to go), who 15 years later still fly fishes about 11.000 Km. south!

I remeber these guys from the shop, the lived in Nepal I think (or maybe Mongolia), they went there with the Peace Corps, taught some people there to tie flies and actually later imported the flies from asia and gave those people a chance to make a few bucks and escape poverty. Cool thing to do.
well, thanks for the tip.

lol, cool! the Alsea has treated me well.. Ive never caught anything huge before, but the chinook salmon, and searun cutthroats are awesome. Chinook on a fly :D good times.. (a 6wt pole) I dunno what I was thinking..

nswallow

07-28-2007, 05:04 PM

When I'm trying to match the hatch I seem to have a big problem! For 1 I can't Identify the flys well enough to see what they're eating. So do you carry a net of some sort to catch the flys to see whats around the pond or stream that you could possibly match something to?

millerbrown

07-28-2007, 05:44 PM

Basically, big trout will eat big prey but if there is an abundance of small prey (numerous flies hatching) they will go for those also. That's why we can catch trout best measured in pounds on very tiny flies. If a big brown is just finning away and a mayfly nymph drifts by the brown will probably take it especially if there is little effort in doing so.

Millerbrown

zimflo.

07-28-2007, 10:23 PM

some people carry a net to catch the insects, but I usually just look at the bottem of a few rocks to see the nymphs, and just roughly immitate the flying insects, afterall artificial flies are impressionistic, so why take the time catching a bug, identify it, find out the scientific name, look in your fly book, and find a recommended pattern lol.. when you could be catching the fisshy!!